Musician Hans van Collem found himself in the penal barracks at Westerbork a year before liberation. There he put together a Jewish male choir. “I thought,
‘We can’t let them destroy us. We’re going to sing,’” said Hans.
During recreational hours in the afternoon and early evening, hundreds of convicts would come and listen to Jewish liturgical hymns and songs.
“In the penal barracks, I met music students and musicians. I was obsessed with choral singing. I thought, “‘We can’t let them destroy us. We’re going to sing.’
I finally convinced a number of men to come and rehearse in the barracks in the evenings, which the guards turned a blind eye to.
But music also occupied us in other ways. Sometimes when digging up potatoes, for example, we would discuss musical problems, draw music staves in the sand,
and solve the problems.
In the evenings, we would write the solutions on bits of toilet paper in the barracks. We had nothing at all. Instruments were forbidden in the penal
barracks. All we had was the prison clothes the Germans gave us.”

(Photo: Robert Oeij)

In the Green Valley, the Quiet ValleyThere were no cabaret or music performances in the penal barracks, as there
were in the other part of the camp. On Sundays, which the prisoners had
“off,” the idea to start singing would often arise spontaneously. Under
Hans’s direction, the male choir would sing Jewish liturgical, secular, and
nostalgic - including Yiddish - songs. “‘Shall we sing for a bit?’ we’d ask
one another, and then we’d go outside. Most of the prisoners in the penal
barracks would come and listen. They would stand there crying during the
performances. The musicians from the penal barracks would sing very
beautifully; they were also much better musicians than I was. But I was
capable of getting them all involved. We would perform out of doors behind
the penal barracks, the outer brick walls of the public lavatories serving
as soundboards.
People would ask us to sing nostalgic songs as well. In het groene dal,
stille dal ["In the Green Valley, the Quiet Valley"] was one of the
songs we would sing.

Offering Beauty and Comfort in Unimaginable Circumstances
On September 13, 1944, just a week after Dolle Dinsdag
[“Mad Tuesday,” September 5, 1944]*, the last train from Westerbork left
carrying prisoners who were sent on to camps in Germany and Poland. Only a
few dozen of the more than 1,000 people in the penal barracks at Westerbork
would stay behind, but no one knew who. Singing the Sunday before seemed
inconceivable. But the members of the choir decided to go ahead anyway,
realizing that their singing offered people a moment of beauty and comfort
in these unimaginable circumstances. Hans recounts that a single tone could
touch people in such a way that they could sense an entire world behind the
music, a vast and abstract void separate from their daily reality. “That’s
what happened in the penal barracks at Westerbork, and people could sense
it. We, the singers, did it; the listeners felt and understood it. I still
see it happen every week—a revelation that music and singing can inspire in
people. The language emanating from music is so spectacular, so strong. Even
a single tone can be so powerful.”
After September 13, 1944, Westerbork was no longer a transit camp, yet it
remained a prison. Hans was one of the sixty-nine people in the penal
barracks who were not sent on. Almost 400 people had been left behind in the
“free” part of the camp. The penal barracks choir no longer existed. Hans
and a group of others founded a new, smaller male choir that sang up until
about January 1945. Subsequently, the approach of the allied armies brought
about so much excitement that the members’ interest in singing began to wane.
Shortly after Canadian forces liberated Westerbork on April 12, 1945, the
British took over the supervision of the camp. In protest against their
prolonged captivity, Hans and others cut through the barbed wire around the
camp and escaped illegally.

Psalm 100, noted by Hans on toilet paper in Westerbork

Dilemma in Gouda, 1942
Hans grew up in Gouda, a Dutch town to which several hundred German Jews had
previously escaped having been forced to flee the Dutch coastal area. Hans’s
parents had also taken in a family. Hans became friends with Hans Kalenbergh,
whose family had found shelter one street over. Kalenbergh was an ardent
choral singer.
Hans founded a small male choir consisting of
about ten members which gave occasional performances at the synagogue in
Gouda. “We sang when they announced the anti-Jewish measures and at the
gatherings of the Jewish community in Gouda. When we had to prepare
ourselves for deportation and pack our bags, we hesitated, wondering whether
we should indeed sing on such an occasion.… But my father said, ‘They let us
work. We’ll survive. With God’s help, we’ll return.’ We then sang synagogue
hymns to give comfort and protection, just as we did later in the penal
barracks at Westerbork.”

Yom Kippur, 1942
One of the anti-Jewish measures came into effect on Yom Kippur - the Day of
Atonement - in September 1942. A long service lasting the whole day was held
in the synagogue. One of the members of the congregation, Sal Gomperts, was
dragged out by a Dutch member of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) and immediately
deported along with his wife and two young daughters. “That was Yom Kippur
1942. The choir never sang again after that.”

Parents and Sister: No Chance of Survival
About a year before Hans ended up at Westerbork, his parents and sister
spent a short time there. None of them survived the war. By order of the
Germans, his parents had reported to Vught on April 22, 1943, and were
subsequently transported to Westerbork in early May. On May 16, 1943, they
arrived at the Sobibor extermination camp and were murdered that very day.
“They didn’t have a chance,” says Hans. The lives of his sister and her
husband ended the same way.
Hans did not accompany his parents and thus did not share their fate. He had
resigned his membership to the Nederlands Israëlitisch Kerkgenootschap
[“Organization of Jewish Communities in the Netherlands”] in Gouda in 1938
owing to a minor disagreement with the other members. This fact, combined
with the results of genealogical research carried out in 1942, allowed him
to acquire the status of “half-Jew,” which offered him protection for some
time. Shortly after his parents had left, Hans nonetheless went into hiding
in Rotterdam in May 1943 because he was supposed to have reported as a
prisoner of war. At the end of March 1944, however, he was betrayed,
arrested, and confined in the Het Haagse Veer police prison at the center of
the city. After two months’ imprisonment, he was sent to Westerbork where he
ended up in the penal barracks, retroactively judged a full-blooded Jew.

Musical Roots
Hans’s mother and father instilled in him their love of music. “I remember
my parents singing parts of La traviata in the kitchen.” Between the ages of
fourteen and sixteen, Hans studied at the Nederlands Israëlietisch
Seminarium [“Dutch Israelite Seminary”] in Amsterdam. Like Hans, the
vice-rector was a great lover of music and encouraged him to continue to
develop his musicality. Hans would visit the Bibliotheca Rosenthaliana at
the University of Amsterdam to get sheet music and to copy the compositions
of Katz, the renowned cantor. Hans was admitted to the Rotterdam Conservatory where he majored in piano
and minored in viola. At that time, the composer and conductor Piet Ketting
taught and conducted various choirs there. He was also an important source
of inspiration for Hans. “I was inspired by Piet Ketting to take up
conducting. I was enthralled by how he stood there before the choir. I had a
knack for conducting and a solid foundation in theory, but from an
instrumental perspective, I was lacking technically. What I was very good at
was conveying things to other people.” The well-known music theorist John
Daniskas also taught at the conservatory. Hans was given voice lessons by
his wife Corrie van Swieten in thanks for taking down Jewish hymns.
Identy card Hans van Collem early 1942, J stands for Jewish

After the War
After the war, music remained an important part of Hans’s life. He worked as
a choral conductor, music school teacher, and ensemble leader. Following his
parents’ example, he, too, has passed on his love of music to his own
children, all four of whom went on to enroll at conservatories. Additionally,
he continued to give violin, viola, and piano lessons, as do his sons Sholem
(violin) and Chajim (cello).

Tuesday, September 5, 1944, has gone down in history as
Dolle Dinsdag [“Mad Tuesday”]. With a message opening with the
sentence “Gij weet dat de bevrijding voor de deur staat” [“Thou
knowest that liberation is at hand”], broadcast on Radio Oranje
[“Radio Orange”] on Sunday evening, September 3, the Netherlands was
giddy with the hope of being liberated.

The Allied forces liberated Antwerp on September 4.
Later that evening, Prime Minister Gerbrandy reported that the allied
armies had crossed the Dutch border. Later, it turned out that this
report was incorrect, but many Dutch people thought that the end of
the war was now close at hand. German occupiers and Dutch
collaborators panicked and made a run for it. Owing to the effect that
Dolle Dinsdag had, the female
prisoners at Vught were sent to Ravensbrück in great haste the
next day, while the men were deported to Sachsenhausen.